steeleydock: Cab Thoughts 6/12/13

"Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs."

– Euripides

The Syrian rebels have just been driven out of Qusair, a rebel stronghold, a center for commerce with Lebanon, a linchpin in Assad's territory between Damascus and access to Russian shipping. What altered the tide of battle was outside intervention. A hardened, well-trained, well-armed Hezbollah force — from the terrorist Shiite group that dominates Lebanon and answers to Iran — crossed into Syria and drove the rebels out of Qusair, which Syrian artillery has left a smoking ruin. This is a huge setback for Obama who has been declaring Assad all but defeated.

Wait until Obama reads about this!

The psychic Sylvia Browne admits she was "mistaken" about claiming back in 2004 that she had communicated with the ghost of Amanda Berry since it has turned out that Berry wasn't dead. It probably was someone else, some confused spirit who thought she was Berry.

Eli Whitney is the inventor of the cotton gin, a great technological advance and a symbol of American ingenuity. Despite the technology, however, the business was a failure because the machine was easy to duplicate. He was saved from bankruptcy by using his facility to make guns for the government.

The latest version of psychiatry’s bible, DSM-5, has named caffeine withdrawal as an actual mental disorder.

The third and fourth Pens-Bruins game were tremendous and may change the Pens for the future. This team was built to win this and now they won't. Some changes will be made and they likely will be big. Either team could have won with pride. But it seems there was little pride in the stands. It sounds as if the crowd was really abusive and threatening to Pittsburgh fans, enough to steal a lot of enjoyment from this great competition. It is terrible when the players rise so far above the fans.

Chinese coal demand has been so strong that the world's consumption of coal has jumped from 5.3 billion tons in 2000 to 8.1 billion tons in 2011. Again nearly all of that growth is a result of exploding Chinese coal demand.

Charles Hartman wrote about the experience of being plagiarized: "The insult was partly that the plagiarist assumed my poem was too obscure for anyone to discover his theft."

Plagiarism: The Roman poet Martial who lived in first century AD had other poets of his day circulating his poems as their own. His response was to write verses admonishing and mocking the thieves. Of one rival he wrote, “The book you’re reciting, Fidentinus, is mine; but when you recite it badly it begins to be yours.” He used the Latin word plagiarius—which until then meant kidnapping—and gave it a new twist so that it was understood as literary theft. The word didn’t appear with this meaning in English until fifteen centuries later, when Richard Montagu, the highly educated bishop of Norwich, used it.

The FBI is unhappy that there are communications technologies that it cannot intercept and wants to require that software makers and communications companies create a back door so they can listen in when they desire. The argument against it is the technology would immediately go to governments and groups who could not develop this kind of technology themselves. That is, the U.S. acts as a technology incubator for its enemies.

Who was ....Alexis St. Martin?

The House Energy and Commerce Committee for some reason has a report on the cost of medical insurance next year. The report draws on data provided by 17 major insurance companies. On average, premiums in the individual market for new customers will nearly double. For some, they could surge by more than 400%. That translates to an average yearly increase of more than $1,800.
The average consumer who already has coverage will pay 73% more.

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/09/too-much-ado.html

The Childhood Goat Trauma Foundation has designated June as Goat Trauma Awareness Month. Throughout the month, the CGTF will sponsor programs across the country to teach people of all ages about the dangers of goat traumas. The Childhood Goat Trauma Foundation was created in 1982 by a small group that originally came together as a an informal support group for problems that were the result of traumatic experiences at petting zoos as children. Regrettably it is only a funny web page and not a tax deductible business. You know that vigilant IRS would have been scrutinizing them.

Until recently, the German language's longest "authentic" word was the 63-letter Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, meaning "the law for the delegation of monitoring beef labeling," according to The Telegraph. But the law was recently repealed, leaving Germans with no reason to use it. The Telegraph notes that "a 39-letter word, Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, insurance companies providing legal protection, is considered the longest German word in everyday use by the Guinness Book of World Records."

The first recorded usage of the term "deus ex machina" is widely acknowledged to have come in Horace's Ars Poetica, in which he warns aspiring poets never to use such a device to solve plot complexities. Horace makes reference to the usage of a primitive crane by which the ancient Greeks used to lower actors playing gods onto the stage at opportune moments in order to resolve situations. The technique was first used by Euripides, the third great Greek poet.

An al Qaeda terrorist stated in a recent online posting that U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens was killed by lethal injection after plans to kidnap him during the Sept. 11, 2012 terror attack in Benghazi went bad. I wonder if that is true and, if not, why they would say it.

A.M. Homes won the prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction for her novel May We Be Forgiven. Homes beat out front-runner Hilary Mantel, as well as other prominent writers such as Zadie Smith, Barbara Kingsolver and Maria Semple.

75% of financial service workers think some people in their organizations are paid excessively, rising to 80% in the banking sector alone. 65% of employees agree that some people in their organization are still rewarded in a way that incentivizes inappropriate behavior, with little difference between the views of senior managers and those of other employees.

"Don't fight the Fed?" There is a general belief that the monetary behavior of the Fed trumps all other aspects of the economy; monetary easing is a vaccine against contraction and decline. Here are two graphs where that was not true:

The 2001-2002 market plunge went hand-in-hand with continuous and aggressive monetary easing.